Maria and Nate’s Guide to GTO Travel

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Thank you guys so much for writing in last week and giving us your feedback about the show.

We really appreciate that.

And we're going to ask you to write in one more time, this time with any questions that you have about your lives, decisions that you're making, things that you might want to know the expected value of.

And Nate and I are going to do our best to have some segments where we respond to those questions.

So, again, our email is riskybusiness at pushkin.fm, all one word.

And we hope to hear from you and we hope to see some of your life dilemmas and hopefully we'll help you with them.

Welcome back to Risky Business, our show about making better decisions.

I'm Maria Konakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

Today on the show, we know a lot of you are in the process of traveling to and from places.

So we'll have Nate and Maria's guide to GTO travel.

What do we do as people who think a lot about optimization

to make our lives easier when we travel?

And then what glaring and hypocritical mistakes do we make, as you'll also find out about?

And after that, we're going to switch gears and talk about cheating in academia, in business schools, and specifically with several researchers who have been accused of cheating in cheating research and research on dishonesty.

So

that'll be a fun one, especially for me since I'm working on a book about cheating.

So this is Thanksgiving week.

We're taping this on Tuesday.

By the time everyone hears it, it will actually be Thanksgiving and they will already be at their destination, we hope, unless some major travel snafus happened.

But this will still be very useful because we're in holiday season, right?

We're going to have holiday travel all through December as well.

Nate, are you traveling for Thanksgiving this year?

Yeah, going to Kansas City to see my partner's family.

I got a lot of travel.

My whole, I got, and then we're going to Vegas, then

Japan, Korea, at some point, probably make it home to Michigan.

So I need, I need these tips, Maria.

All right.

So we're going to actually do this segment in a slightly different, fun way.

I hope fun.

And we're going to ask each other questions.

Nate and I do not know what the questions are.

We have not seen each other's questions ahead of time.

So this is going to be kind of a spur of the moment response to each other.

Nate.

Shall I start us off with our question, Robbie?

Why don't you start?

Yeah.

All right.

All right.

Question number one.

How early should you get to the airport?

Oh, boy, Robbie and I, my partner, are just having an argument about this today.

I love it.

Those are the best arguments.

I aim, traditionally, I aim to be at the airport an hour before departure time for a domestic flight.

It's departure time, not boarding time.

Now, in practice, like the security system has improved.

I have like pre-check.

I actually don't have pre-check, which is weird.

Nate.

Wait, we need to talk about this.

Okay, everyone listening, this is like the number one thing to do in GTO travel.

Get TSA pre-check, get global entry if you travel abroad.

I am shocked that my co-host could be so negligent.

Nate, why?

There are workarounds.

Clear is pretty good.

Clear is basically pre-check.

No, I should.

I should.

Yeah, I'm committing like the sunk cost.

I'm committing lots of cognitive errors by not doing that.

You're right.

Yes.

All right.

So without pre-check, i would say and without clear you should probably be getting to the airport earlier um than than one hour right especially around the holidays because the line's gonna be the holidays in particular i mean look yeah

if you arrive at the airport an hour before departure time for a domestic flight you should not miss your flight if you have unless you're in like the cattle car line with no clear or no premium or anything like that right you should be able to make it through on time all right well um I actually happen to agree with you on this one.

An hour is what I do as well for domestic travel around the holidays, especially if you don't have TSA pre-check, like some people, you might want to consider longer.

But if you are in that catalyst with no pre-check, no anything, and you are cutting it close, come up to the agents and tell them what time your flight is.

They will often let you skip the line and actually not miss your flight because they don't want you missing your flight either, because that fucks up travel for everyone.

Maria, what is your best travel hack?

My best travel hack is never checking luggage.

And when I say never, I actually mean never.

I am a female, as people might have noticed, and I am capable of going on a month-long trip, six-week-long trip, with just carry-ons.

I have a carry-on suitcase, a little, you know, rollerboard, which is the max size, and I have a backpack,

which is always my extra travel thing.

And the backpack fits a lot as well.

And I am very, very good at recycling outfits, at

packing, you know, very, packing very well so that I can manage without any carry-ons.

I think this saves you huge amounts of time, huge amounts of hassle.

I don't have a single friend or family member who has checked luggage who has not had it lost at some point.

And yeah, so I think that that's the single best piece of advice i can offer learn to pack light do not check your bags

if you are going to an international destination and you have to clear customs when you arrive there's less cost to that because i mean i'm generally agreeing right but like because there by the time you're through customs magically your bags might be there at the little carousel but yeah i mean the the risk of having your bag i'm surprised that more strangers don't like steal people's bags right it's it's so weird because you have all this security in the airport and then like you get to the carousel and like, take your pick, take whatever you want.

So I am actually shocked that,

you know, knowing what we know about human nature, I'm shocked that more bags don't get stolen.

All right, next question.

Nate, what is your most underrated thing to always pack when you're traveling?

A podcast microphone.

Like I, okay.

That's amazing.

I usually bring a little bit of cash because you never know when you're going to get bored and there might be a poker room nearby.

This is very good.

That is very good advice.

I think you should always have cash on you and you should always have more cash than you think you need.

Don't go over the limits.

Well, the limits are

internationally, there's a $10,000 limit.

Domestically, there's not supposed to be.

Although I've had a problem with it once, especially if you fly to like

Vegas or New York, people are used to having a lot of cash in those cities.

I don't know what people people are doing with the cash in New York, but like, you know, some, some off the records, something or another.

Um,

yeah, I mean,

if a uninformed security person asks, do you have more than $10,000?

And you should say, I'm allowed to because I'm American citizen.

This is my currency.

And, um,

and, and whatchamacallit.

And like, I'm not flying internationally where these rules apply.

Um, don't like try to bring $50,000 to like the Bahamas or something.

No, that's a really big mistake.

That's a horrible mistake.

Yep.

So what's what's the best airport?

What's your favorite airport?

My favorite airport, I would say, is Heathrow, because talk about nice places to hang out, nice places to eat.

I don't think anything can beat Heathrow.

I mean,

you can be a surprise.

Yeah, you can associate with like very, very, very long lines and very,

so here's the thing.

So what's my most, my favorite airport to travel through is absolutely not Heathrow, right?

Heathrow is a nightmare in terms of lines.

But if I have to be stuck in an airport, I want to be stuck in Heathrow because I can get good food, right?

I can, I can go to the fucking caviar bar and sit there.

I can,

you know, and there are good bookshops, which I really admire, like I really like that.

And it's just, it's nice, right?

There are lots of places to spend time.

In terms of efficiency, absolutely not Heathrow.

I don't like traveling through Heathrow.

I have heard, so I haven't done a lot of travel through Asia, but I have heard that some of the best airports in the world are some of the Asian airports that are like mini countries with, you know, tropical rainforests.

And I look forward to visiting those one day.

All right, Nate, let's do the other way.

What's the most overrated airport?

You know, I think LA, I mean, LA, the problem is like all these terminals are changing and turning around.

And so like, I used to think there's some terminals in LAX that are like quite annoying.

Miami airport is kind of a total shit show.

Fort Laudale might be a little bit better, but then takes forever to get an Uber.

Yeah, those are on the native, you know, Phoenix is kind of a shitty airport.

I'm going to, I'm going to add one that you haven't to the overrated airport, which is O'Hare, because people always say that O'Hare is so, you know, lovely and efficient.

But I think O'Hare is such a shit show, and I have never been delayed more often than I have been in O'Hare.

Yeah, I used to, and again, can you blame airports for having, I mean, they have two airlines that try to have hubs there.

But like, yeah, and like, oh, the facilities have not been like updated at O'Hare for

a long time.

They do have a Tortos Frantera, which is like this amazing Rick Bayless restaurant, but like, but there's not very many places to like sit down.

And if you do have like one of those long winter delays in Chicago, then it's pretty unpleasant.

It is, it is pretty unpleasant.

And also talk about having to walk far.

O'Hare is one of those airports where you might be walking for half an hour before you finally make it to your destination.

Maria, what is your go-to airport

My go-to airport meal is: I actually bring food with me.

I refuse, so I never eat on planes.

I don't care, unless there are some exceptions, like when I fly to Hong Kong, right, where I'm on a plane for so long that it's not even funny, or when I, you know, when I fly to South Africa, like when I fly somewhere really, really, really far away.

But otherwise, I don't eat on airplanes.

And that's actually, by the way, little tip for from kind of the psychology of sleep and how to help your body adjust to time zones.

I did a lot of research on this and spent some time with kind of the best sleep researchers at Harvard for a fellowship I did at one point.

And that's one of the best hacks that you can have in order to transition and to not be jet-lagged: do not eat on the airplane, but do drink a lot.

So I usually will get sushi actually ahead of time and will bring sushi because I like to eat something really nice and light and eat it at the end.

You're allowed to take that through security?

Yeah, you can absolutely take sushi through security.

It's not a liquid.

It's got liquidity.

It's not a liquid or a gel.

The soy sauce?

What do you need about the soy sauce?

It's a liquid sauce.

You don't have to.

So the soy sauce, I've actually never had a problem with, but if you do have a problem and they confiscate your soy sauce, there is always soy sauce at.

Just go to the Panda Express, steal exactly.

Just go somewhere in the airport and get soy sauce.

But I recommend eat light, no carbs, do not eat pizza.

The worst mistake I ever made was at one point

eating a hamburger in a Boston airport because I was really, really hungry and I was so sick.

So do not do that.

So

that's, that's, that's my, that's my,

like, I,

I think airports is like the best setting for like fast food, right?

Like I want like a Wendy's or some shit and not some weird off-brand hamburger restaurant that probably sucks, right?

Like the one time when you want logistics of like serving people food quickly.

I mean, I agree about like, even if you're in business class or something,

it's just very hard to prepare

good airline food for like a mass audience, unless you get to the real high-end luxury market, Emirates or one of the Asian airlines or whatnot.

Yeah, people have this like sunk cost fallacy of,

oh, I'm getting this free meal because I'm flying business.

And you actually, a lot of time, you're better off just sleeping or doing whatever you want to do, reading, drinking,

et cetera.

And like, have your meal first.

You'll have a better meal

almost for sure.

Yeah, I'm so glad you agree with me.

Yes, it is crazy to me that there are so many people who fly first class, business class, who have the money to pay for that ticket, who are like, ooh, free food, right?

That doesn't change from college, right?

The free food.

You want to get the free free food.

It's much better for your body.

It's much better for you.

It's much tastier if you don't do that.

Nate, when you go into a new city, what's the most underrated thing to do?

I mean, I just, I'm a big walker.

I walk around a lot, right?

I hate being confined to a hotel.

Yeah, you know, I'll look up, I'll look up, do a little scouting, do some restaurant.

Yeah.

Work, you know, I'm trying to find cuisines.

Like, for example,

the Vietnamese food tends to be better on the west coast than in new york and so that's a comparative advantage category for example or or you know tacos in la or texas so yeah

uh take an uber or something to like a fun neighborhood have some tacos and then walk around I'm totally with you.

And I actually love traveling with you, Nate, because you and I both love food and you are always up for culinary adventures.

And that is something that I really appreciate.

Walking and then having some good food is, I think, the best thing to do in a new city.

I don't know how underrated it is, but it's wonderful.

What's the best place to kill time in an airport?

Is there any scenario, let's say, and let's exclude any type of exclusive lounges or anything like that, right?

Yeah.

Think about any airport.

And now let's say, oh, your flight's been delayed for an hour and a half.

Is there any airport where you're like, oh, I'm actually kind of happy about that because I get to hang out in place X?

No, I'm never happy about flight delays.

That is absolutely not happening.

But if you don't have a good book, I would say go to the bookstore, pick up a good book and get lost in it.

That's the best thing I can think of.

Otherwise,

if you're with someone and your flight is really delayed, get some alcohol,

get some food and just pretend you're not stuck in the airport.

But be careful with that because you also don't want to be dehydrated and drunk when you get onto the plane.

So

that's a short-term solution.

No more than one drink.

Yeah, I don't pledge to abide by that.

That's fine.

That's fine.

When you rent a car, do you get insurance?

I don't have a license.

Yeah.

There you go.

And

I didn't know how to drive up until a few years ago, and I just learned.

So, but I have heard that rental car insurance is a scam.

So I never.

I really think that rental cars are pretty often not worth it.

I mean, you know, even down into like the kind of small to medium-sized metro areas, um, the Uber is pretty good.

And people have this like fallacy where like you're like, oh, I have to pay marginally for these Uber or lift rides when like renting a car can be pretty expensive.

There is insurance.

I've had rental cars that I wasn't driving myself broken into and things like that.

And like, yeah, I'm very anti-rental car.

And it takes a long time to like return the car.

And like, oh, for sure.

I mean, there are some, if you go to like a national park or something, you have to, but like,

uh you usually should be avoided yeah I'm I'm with you um in cities unless you really need it um no rental cars totally agree uh what is the median amount of airline credit you require to be bumped off your flight

um a million

i would never i mean i i book my travel because i need to get places and i need to get shit done and you are not getting me off my flight i'm sorry um i am not i'm not getting bumped to the next day I hate delays.

I mean, let me, let me rephrase, if there's a flight in like 20 minutes, sure,

you can bump me, but usually that's not the case, right?

Whenever they're offering a lot of money, that means that you're going to be bumped, you know, that evening or the next day or something horrible like that.

And to me, it's just not worth it.

Like there's my time is more valuable.

You don't think people are a little bit irrational about that?

I think that some people will irrationally accept any amount of money because they're like, ooh, money, awesome.

That's great.

But when, like I said, when I book my travel, like I don't like traveling

and like, I like being places, but I don't like the process of travel.

And I usually do it with,

you know, without that much margin of error in the sense that I

need to be somewhere by a specific time.

And that's where I'm going.

And even if it's vacation, like I want to start my vacation.

I don't want to spend another day in whatever city I'm in.

If you give me like, there is an amount of money, like if you give me thousands of dollars, like if you give me 5K,

I'll probably be okay with being bumped on a flight if I'm going on vacation, right?

If you give me an amount of money that pays for my vacation, like sure, and you give it to me in cash.

But oftentimes.

That's often not the case either.

It's like travel credit or some bullshit where you're not actually getting the money.

And by the way, no one's paying you 5K.

Like that, that is an outlandish amount.

Do any airports have poker rooms?

I'm looking this up.

I guess not, right?

I have no idea, but that's hilarious.

While you're looking up poker rooms, business class versus first class

versus first class?

I mean, these days, I think it's basically the same thing.

There are so many funny distinct.

I mean, you have to know the airline and the route, right?

If you really care about this stuff, then like, I mean, look, there's only

There's only so many things an airline can ultimately provide you with, right?

Even until you get to like, like I said, the very top tier first classes, like,

you know, if you have a bed where you can recline, I mean, I don't know.

I guess you have like these private suites, but you're getting mediocre free food.

You're getting as much free booze as you want, but you maybe don't want that much.

And you're getting a seat that you can fully recline in, then I don't know.

Beyond that, I tend to think that like there's diminishing returns on the amenities that you get.

But yeah.

Totally agree with you.

I did once take a shower in a plane.

I got bumped up, bumped up on Emirates flying back from Bangkok, and that was pretty cool.

All right.

Do you have any more questions for me?

Worst travel decision you've ever made.

Worst travel decision I've ever made.

I think I kind of already answered this, and that was checking bags on my way to Georgia.

But other than checking bags,

I think that you have to be really, really careful with your layovers.

And sometimes you make really shitty decisions decisions without realizing it because there's an airport that's known for a delay, or the airline will let you book a flight where the layover is just way too tight.

And if you don't know the airport, you're fucked.

Like, I once had Delta allow me to book an international flight, and it was not direct.

It was through Atlanta.

And I think my connection was 30 minutes long, something like that.

I have no idea why they let me do that.

And if you've been to the Atlanta airport, like Atlanta has multiple terminals, like you have to take a little tram in between them.

Like that shit ain't fast.

And I missed an international connection and I didn't do anything wrong.

Like Delta let me book this, but it was just way not enough time.

And I think that paying attention to that is actually really important.

And sometimes you don't because you just assume that an airline is not going to let you book a connection that's too tight to miss.

But they just assume that it's going to be the best case scenario, right?

Like everything's on time, like you arrive on time.

But the moment your flight's 20 minutes late, like you're fucked.

Yeah, no, I mean, you have to know the, I mean, because they actually have tables of how long the minimum connection time is at different airports.

And just like, like, I will take a short connection in Detroit because the airport's just not that big.

And to get from one end to the other, a little Skytrain thing takes 10 minutes, right?

Atlanta, Atlanta, you gotta, I mean, Atlanta is an overrated airport too.

People are like, oh, Atlanta, I don't know.

We haven't talked about Atlanta.

Yes.

Atlanta is very much an overrated airport.

Yeah.

I mean, it has a little bit more capacity capacity than, yeah, look,

my worst decision, I'm not going to blame myself for this, but let's say somebody in the traveling party made the following calculation, right?

We were flying back home from Rio to New York via Sao Paulo.

And the person who made this booking didn't realize that there are more than one airport in Sao Paulo.

It's one of the biggest metro areas in the world.

And so we flew into this little commuter domestic airport.

And of course, our flights in the big flu, I don't know what the fuck it's called.

The big international airport that's about

45 minutes by

Uber or taxi, if you're taking the right route.

So we get an Uber.

We explained to the guy that we're kind of in a hurry.

And then lo and behold, we're kind of out on this like country road.

And we were getting further and further away from the airport.

And I guess ostensibly he was taking some very circuitous route that was going to take an hour and a half, which wasn't going to work.

And so, you know, we don't speak English.

We're in, we don't speak Spanish.

Excuse me.

We don't speak Portuguese.

I do speak a tiny bit of Spanish,

but not Portuguese at all.

And, you know, we kind of think we might be getting like kidnapped.

And I'm not quite sure what.

And so we start like.

getting hysterical at the guy.

And then and then eventually he kind of is like, okay, these guys are going to fucking, I don't know what.

But he felt like he had to stop this premise of like taking us in this very long route at best being kidnapped at worst.

And then I don't know what was wrong with the guy.

Right.

And then we're trying to tell him which gate to go to or which terminal and he like wouldn't listen to us.

And so like, we're just so flustered when we finally leave the airport that like I leave.

My passport had fallen out of my wallet and

in this guy's fucking Uber.

Right.

And

he comes rushing in and actually gives us the passport, right?

So same to travel nightmare.

Wow.

So I wasn't sure what star rating.

So he tried to kidnap us,

but he did.

So on the one hand, he tried to kidnap us, but on the other hand, he gave us back our passport.

So I gave him three stars.

Okay.

That averages out.

Hey, that is a horror story.

Oh my God.

Yeah,

I get very nervous, especially by myself when things like that start happening.

I love that you can share your location these days, and I highly recommend it, whether you're male or female.

You know, if something's going wrong, just share your location and make sure that the driver knows it.

Um, and use Google TranslateNate for Portuguese to tell them how to say it.

Say, you know, my

big bodyguard friend knows exactly where I am at this moment.

But I've got it all worked out.

And on that note, we hope you've enjoyed our GTO guide and let's take a break and talk about some cheating.

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So, Nate, have you been following this story about academic cheating that first broke in the public sphere last year, 2023, about Francesca Gino and Dan Arielli, Harvard Business School and Duke Business School, and how there are potentially fabricated and manipulated results in some of their work on dishonesty?

Yeah, as a,

I don't know.

As someone who likes to tweak the expert class when it fucks things up, I've been following this, but probably not as closely as you have.

This came out because a team of researchers that call themselves Data Collada were able to do some statistical analysis very in-depth.

These are brilliant guys,

and they were able to kind of publish this series of reports that showed, uh-oh, right, this

work on being unethical is actually unethical in and of itself.

And this prompted, you know, big reckoning.

Francesca Gino was placed on leave, and she ended up suing both Harvard and Data Colada.

Her lawsuit against Data Colada has since been dismissed.

But

Dan Arielia, as far as I know, is still on faculty at Duke.

And by the way, this is not the first time he has been accused.

There have been multiple accusations of improper research in the past.

There has been a crisis of confidence in social psychology for a long time and because of replication issues, not because of fraud and misconduct.

But now, you know, we're adding academic misconduct.

And there was a recent piece that just came out last week.

It's going to be

in

the next print issue of The Atlantic by Daniel Enber, who actually showed that it turns out that multiple people may have been fabricating data and that this is an endemic problem, especially among business school researchers.

So what do we think about this

other than the obvious irony that like, holy shit, you know, people who are researching ethics are not ethical.

There is some irony in comparing it to like the poker community, which is also a place that seems to like be quite

tolerant of cheating.

Yeah, look, I have various critiques.

I mean, number one, I think the modal academic paper is crap.

Agreed.

Because it's hard to have original findings in a competitive field.

There's a lot of pressure to publish.

And so, like, the modal paper is a paper that

applies some, and stysical inference is hard.

And people don't, they may not have formal training in it, but like having intuition is harder.

Right.

And so the modal academic paper is either coming to some counterintuitive conclusion.

that seems needed, but it's actually just an artifact of the research design, or a politically correct conclusion, because those papers tend to get greenlit more, right?

You know, the fact that there is, I don't know, is there a fine line between cheating and just shitty methodology?

I think there is, probably.

But I think the peer-reviewed system is pretty broken.

And we both know about the replication crisis where by various definitions, when you try to recreate independently a positive study result, then those recreation rates are low.

Yeah, I think that you're raising a really, really important point, though, that I want to just go back to a little bit before we dive further into kind of this actual fraud and misconduct, which is this lack of statistical knowledge sometimes.

So I have a PhD in psychology, right?

So I actually, I went through this academic training.

I had to take some stats classes, but it's not like I had to take advanced statistics, right?

Like I, you know, and I knew how little of a sense I had for a lot of these things.

So when it actually came time to analyze my final data set, which was, you know, thousands and thousands of participants,

I wanted to make sure that I avoided any potential pitfalls.

So I did some analysis myself that I could do, right?

You know, some more basic tests, but I knew what my, I knew what conclusion, you know, I knew what my research premise was.

And so that can bias you in different ways.

So what I then did was I hired a statistician who had no idea what I was researching, who was not a psychologist.

I just gave him all the data and said, this is what I need you to do, right?

Build me models, run these analyses, and tell me what you find.

find.

And that's actually how I ended up taking care of that problem.

I was like, if he finds, if he finds things that actually are done in a much more complicated way than I'm doing, great.

Because one of the things that has actually been a huge problem in academia for a very long time, hence part of the replication crisis, is a concept known as p-hacking.

And p-hacking, so the p-value is your significance value on a paper, right?

And it's somewhat arbitrarily 0.05

is kind of your threshold, right?

So if you're below 0.05, the finding's significant.

If you're not, the finding's not significant.

So it can be like marginally significant.

If you have like a 0.06, anyway, it is a little bit arbitrary and funny, but people would do something known as p-hacking, which is you run your analysis, right?

You have some sort of hypothesis, you gather your data, and you find that your p-value is not significant.

And you're like, hmm, what if I excluded this set of participants?

Or what if I excluded this set of data?

What if I excluded, you know, based on education or excluded all men or excluded, you know, blah, blah, blah.

Usually it's not excluding all men, but they end up trying to manipulate the statistics a little bit by seeing, oh, well, is it going to be significant now?

What about now?

What about now?

Until they find a result that is significant.

And that's what they publish.

But they didn't have any a priori hypotheses about why you're going to do that to the data.

So I had a lot of times when I was excluding certain things from the data, but I would say ahead of time, right, like I'm going to be excluding X, Y, and Z for these reasons, right?

Because I actually have a hypothesis that this is going to matter.

And that's not, you know, that's not what I'm looking at.

So if you fall into these categories, I'm just not going to use your data.

People have tried to, now that people are aware that this is a problem, they are trying to kind of

remedy it by saying, okay, let's pre-register all studies.

Let's pre-register your conclusions.

Pre-register all of your analyses to try to avoid p-hacking.

But you raise a really interesting point.

When p-hacking was prevalent, I had someone at Columbia, in the Columbia Psychology Department, not my advisor, who was Walter Michel, who's amazing, but I had someone, when I had an analysis that didn't quite work, be like, have you tried running it without X or have you tried doing it in this type of analysis instead?

And I was like,

no, and I'm not going to.

But that is a frequent response.

Yeah, I mean, you have to be be

really, I mean, this also applies to journalism when you're writing about things that have some amount of complexity, right?

Is it kind of just on you.

I mean, it's very hard to detect a story that like omits certain relevant qualifying facts or arranges the chairs in a way that tells a certain narrative.

And you have to kind of be just a real stickler for accuracy, right?

And you also have to know that like when you, I mean, I have lots of ideas for like newsletter posts, right?

And then you have something that seems promising and then maybe you look at it in a second way and then you're like, this seems like there's not much there.

And then you probably just have to shelve that post, right?

Or every now and then you can find some way to salvage it for something.

But like, yeah, I think some people don't know it's bad, right?

They think, oh, I'm doing science by like trying a new regression formula until I find one that has a high R squared.

And like,

yeah.

And that's not good.

And then there's also pressure to like, you know, if you look at like what the p-values are in published paper, paper, there's a big spike at exactly 0.05 because 0.05 is deemed as good and 0.06 is deemed as bad.

And we'll be right back after this break.

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I think that there are a lot of people who aren't like as, you know, who aren't fabricating data, right?

Who aren't actually manipulating data and manipulating data sets, but who are doing these like more subtle things that seem okay and, you know, seem like they'll

get your research over the line, which actually dovetails really nicely with one of the other reasons why I think we're getting these sorts of scandals, these sorts of crises, you know, replication crisis before, and now this

just realization that a lot of studies that are published by researchers, especially in business schools, where peer review is even more broken than it is in other places, I think one of the reasons is the misaligned incentives, right?

The incentives for tenure, the incentives for promotion are quantity over quality a lot of the times, right?

They, the publish or perish mantra is not bullshit.

And I was very lucky when

I was in grad school that I knew I had zero desire to go into academia.

So my incentives were pure, right?

Like I just wanted to do the research because I was really interested in it.

And I knew that I was never going to be on the academic job market.

So I didn't care if it was publishable, right?

Like I didn't actually care what the significance was.

I didn't care what would end up happening.

I got very lucky that I had cool, significant findings, but I never ended up publishing them.

But there are so many people for whom the incentives are, right, from the very, very beginning.

You have to publish, publish, publish in order to get that first appointment, in order to get a promotion, in order to get tenure.

And quantity is rewarded.

I remember having a conversation with my advisor, Walter Michel, who, for people who don't know,

was kind of one of the most prominent social psychologists of the 20th century,

who did did kind of the marshmallow studies, but he did a lot of other work as well.

An incredibly,

an incredibly prominent researcher who has since passed away.

And I remember having this conversation with him about academia.

And he said, and I think that this was very true, that he never would have gotten his first job.

He never would have gotten tenure.

He never would have had his career progression in the modern market.

Because when he was hired for the first time, he had two publications.

And they happened to be be incredibly important publications with very deep theory.

And so back then, schools were like, oh, this is really, really interesting.

But he said that he wouldn't go into academia these days because you can't do theory work, right?

You can't do research that's longitudinal, that takes years and years and years.

And so I feel like the field of psychology, and not just psychology, I think this is true in academic work in general, has become diminished because you can't do important studies, right?

You can't do a lot of this important work anymore because it's not going to produce results for years.

And some of it is kind of very theoretical when you're trying to develop these big ideas and big theories.

And instead, you know, you are incentivized to focus on one specific type of neuron that does one very specific thing in the brain.

And we, you know, and we're just going to publish a lot about that.

And I think that those are very misaligned incentives if you want good research, if you want ethical research, and if you want research that's actually going to be meaningful and make a difference in in the world.

There's another irony too, which is that

because academic prose kind of is willfully obfuscatory, is that a term?

It obfuscates and

it's just I've never said that word out loud nate, but it's that's the right word.

Yeah.

It's harder to detect flaws because the writing is so bad

that often it conceals really sloppy thinking.

And the opposite can be true.

So people like Dan Arielle are really good writers.

And so you actually miss the logical leaps that they're taking where, wait, A doesn't actually lead to B, but because you're such a good writer and you made it sound so nice, I thought that A led to B.

Please continue.

Yeah, no, I guess it's kind of like a U-shaped curve where like.

Mediocre to good writing, it's easier to detect problems than like very persuasive writing, which is aiming to persuade you, or very unclear writing, which is, you know, again,

unless you are writing in a non-native language, then in general, we're not doing

particle physics here, right?

In general, for any type of B school study, if you can't explain it, well, you probably don't know what you're talking about.

Yeah, I think that's very true.

And I think the other, one of the other problems that we see is that you also have an incentive to kind of have your work, especially for business school, have your work be out there, right?

And have journalists write about that.

Journalists often don't have statistical training, right?

They don't, they don't actually, when they're looking at a paper, there are are some journalists who do absolutely, who are very rigorous about this, but most journalists, like they, you know, they look at the abstract, right?

They look at a few things, but it's not like they have the resources to be able to tell is this a solid study or not.

And so they might report it the way that more misaligned incentives, the way that the press release puts it, right?

The way that the PR department actually puts it.

The way that's a problem.

Even more so in this era where

journalists are concerned or liberal journalists are concerned that, oh, science is under attack from Trump, then like

there is some degree of expertise laundering that you go shopping for an academic study that tells you the thing that you want to hear.

And then you get quotes from the same group of four people.

A lot of problems, Maria.

There are a lot of problems.

And I think this is a topic that we'll be returning to.

It's something that I'm writing about in my next book, which is about cheating.

And I think that is just something that everyone needs to be aware of.

And one other thing, you know, once this is something that I actually wrote on my sub stack last week, you know, once misinformation, once kind of incorrect results get out there, it's really difficult.

You can't just take it back because the way that our brains work, they don't work that way, right?

Like you just misremember it, not on purpose, but like there's so much stuff that I remember from, you know, my grad school days where I'm like, oh, right, like if you do X, X, then Y happens.

And like that shit's been retracted, but I don't necessarily either I wasn't aware of it or I didn't, you know, it didn't really register, but it still informs my thinking, right?

So even if you know about it, it's incredibly difficult to undo those effects.

So if you're, you know, I think if you're a journalist, you have to be, try to be vigilant.

You're going to make mistakes.

Like, you know, I've made mistakes.

Just make sure that you correct yourself and try to, just try to hold yourself to a high standard.

But if you're an academic researcher, you have to do that as well.

And the incentives aren't there.

And when the incentives aren't there, I think.

Yeah, the behavior doesn't really change.

People are very efficient.

Even if, even if,

even if a lot of people are truth-seeking and academia has that

capacity more than some, right?

We know from studying games that like.

If there's a way to exploit something and it's a profitable exploit, then some unscrupulous person is going to take advantage of it.

Right.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And if the incentives are so out of whack as they are in academia, it doesn't take like a really unscrupulous person.

There are degrees of this, right?

There are people who aren't going to fabricate data sets, but who will potentially like get rid of some outlier results or like swap data points around just a tiny bit, right?

Like little things.

And they'll be like, oh, well, it's not as bad as fabricating a data.

I'm not that bad.

I didn't really do anything wrong.

And I know my results are correct, right?

I believe in me.

And I know that this thesis is accurate.

So I'm just doing something good.

It's really easy to start justifying bad behavior when you're incentivized to do that.

And every single institution right now incentivizes that.

And this is true, you know, outside of academia as well.

Whenever you're trying to figure out, like, what are, how are people going to behave, look at the incentive structures, right?

Look at what type of behavior is incentivized.

Since I am sort of a journalist, I mean, like, having more skepticism

about things you read in an academic paper, just you need the level has to be like

two to three X higher than it is right now.

I totally agree with that.

And yeah, that's it's a sobering conclusion.

And as someone who does, you know, who does have a PhD in psychology and who believes in the discipline, who thinks that it has a ton to add, like it breaks my heart because I want, you know, I want good data.

I want good studies.

I think there's so much that we can learn about the human mind.

I just want people to do good work.

So please, please do good work.

Let us know what you think of the show.

Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.

Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Konikova.

And by me, Nate Silver.

The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

Our associate producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang.

Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

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